The Most Popular Netflix Movies of 2023 Are Very Telling

As Netflix has promised, it is releasing full viewership figures for all of its content every six months in a massive spreadsheet with over 15,000 titles, broken into TV and movies and ranked from most-watched to least. The list is telling, at least in regard to the most popular movies from July until December 2023, mostly in that there’s so much Netflix content here that — despite its popularity — many titles have already been completely forgotten.

The top film on the list is Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali’s Leave the World Behind, which was at least memorable, even if the reviews were mixed and many found the ending lacking. Number two on that list is Heart of Stone. Heart of what? I had completely forgotten all about that one and had to look it up: It’s the Gal Gadot action pic that scored a measly 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The third most popular film was Leo, an animated movie that my kids actually thought was decent. The number four movie was Nowhere, and if it’s not immediately recognizable, it’s likely because it was a Spanish-language film. But the premise is insane: It’s about a pregnant woman adrift alone at sea, trapped in a storage container, trying to flee an authoritarian country. That is bleak.

The fifth most popular movie from that period is The Out-Laws , a film I have no memory of that stars Adam Devine, Nina Dobrev, and Pierce Brosnan and looks as though it were written by AI, which is a familiar look for Netflix movies. It has a 21 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Next up is Hidden Strike, an action movie starring Jackie Chan and John Cena. What? There was an action movie starring Jackie Chan and John Cena? I had no idea. It has a 24 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, proving again that Netflix viewers will apparently watch anything.

Seventh on the list is Reptile. It stars Benicio del Toro, Alicia Silverstone, and Justin Timberlake. I did watch it and tried to look up the review, but I straight-up forgot to review it, which shows you how memorable it was. Next was The Killer, which I also had to look up because I thought maybe it was a Spanish-language movie, but no: That was the really good David Fincher film starring Michael Fassbender. It was just hard to remember because the title was so generic.

Jennifer Garner’s The Family Switch is next. I started to watch that one with my kids, but 30 minutes later, they were so bored that we turned it off. And they loved Garner’s Yes Day so much that they had one of their own for their birthday that year.

The final two were The Boss Baby, the 2017 animated film, and the admittedly delightful Adam Sandler comedy, You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, easily the most popular movie in America among 11 to 13-year-old Jewish girls.

Not among the top ten: My favorite Netflix original of the back half of 2023, Fair Play (#37), the mostly lame Bill Burr comedy, Old Dads (#29), and surprisingly (to me, anyway), Pain Hustlers, the underwhelming opioid movie starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans.

Mostly, though, the list is remarkable for how little longevity any of these films will likely have. Huge stars, big budgets, and Netflix seems more interested in blowing up the algorithm for 90 days than creating films that viewers will return to in future years. Netflix has been making movies for well over a decade now, and I’m not sure they’ve made even one future classic yet.

FYI: The top three stand-up specials during that period were Matt Rife, Shane Gillis, and Ricky Gervais, if you’re wondering what the state of comedy is on Netflix right now.

Things were at least slightly less depressing on the TV side where the top ten shows of that period were One Piece, Dear Child, Who is Erin Carter?, Lupin: Part 3, The Witcher season three (47 million), Sex Education season four, Beckham, CocoMelon season eight, Virgin River season five, The Lincoln Lawyer season two, and Painkiller.